WRPN (or Windows Reverse Polish Notation) is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

scientific

software calculator A software calculator is a calculator that has been implemented as a computer program, rather than as a physical hardware device. They are among the simpler interactive software tools, and, as such, they provide operations for the user to sele ...

, simulating the Hewlett-Packard Voyager series'

HP-16C The HP-16C Computer Scientist is a programmable pocket calculator that was produced by Hewlett-Packard between 1982 and 1989. It was specifically designed for use by computer programmers, to assist in debugging. It is a member of the HP Voyager ...

"Computer Scientist"

programmable calculator Programmable calculators are calculators that can automatically carry out a sequence of operations under the control of a stored computer programming, program. Most are Turing complete, and, as such, are theoretically general-purpose computers. ...

History

On April 3, 1995, Emmet P. Gray, an American

programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles Software development, ''software developer'' and Software engineering, ''software engineer' ...

, at the time civilian employee at the

US Army The United States Army (USA) is the primary land service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is designated as the Army of the United States in the United States Constitution.Article II, section 2, clause 1 of the United Stat ...

, now

adjunct professor An adjunct professor is a type of academic appointment in higher education who does not work at the establishment full-time. The terms of this appointment and the job security of the tenure vary in different parts of the world, but the term is gen ...

at the

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, TA&M, or TAMU) is a public university, public, Land-grant university, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas, United States. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of ...

, released ''WRPN'' 1.0 (

16-bit 16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors. A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two ...

), a

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

written in

Borland C++ Borland C++ was a C and C++ IDE (integrated development environment) released by Borland for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. It was the successor to Turbo C++ and included a better debugger, the Turbo Debugger, which was written in protected mo ...

4.0 for early versions of

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. As of September 2024 the project is still in active development, and the latest ''WRPN'' 7.1.1 was released on August 26, 2024, for modern operating systems with

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

installed, and as a mobile application for Android. Source code is available in C#,

VB.NET Visual Basic (VB), originally called Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), is a multi-paradigm, object-oriented programming language developed by Microsoft and implemented on .NET, Mono, and the .NET Framework. Microsoft launched VB.NET in 2002 as the ...

ASP.NET ASP.NET is a server-side web-application framework designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It was developed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, applications and services. The name stands for Ac ...

and

Features

''WRPN'' simulates almost all of the functions of HP-16C: * RPN (

Reverse Polish notation Reverse Polish notation (RPN), also known as reverse Łukasiewicz notation, Polish postfix notation or simply postfix notation, is a mathematical notation in which operators ''follow'' their operands, in contrast to prefix or Polish notation ...

) input support * Floating point, Decimal, Hexadecimal, Octal and Binary modes * Word sizes from 1–64 bits per word * Signed math *

Logical operators In logic, a logical connective (also called a logical operator, sentential connective, or sentential operator) is a logical constant. Connectives can be used to connect logical formulas. For instance in the syntax of propositional logic, the ...

Bitwise operators In computer programming, a bitwise operation operates on a bit string, a bit array or a binary numeral (considered as a bit string) at the level of its individual bits. It is a fast and simple action, basic to the higher-level arithmetic opera ...

* 32 storage registers * 4 position stack * 203 lines of program memory

JRPN

In 2019 Bill Foote, an American software engineer and ex-Lead of the

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

' standardization of interactive technologies for

Blu-ray Blu-ray (Blu-ray Disc or BD) is a digital optical disc data storage format designed to supersede the DVD format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released worldwide on June 20, 2006, capable of storing several hours of high-defin ...

and other TV platforms, created the ''JRPN'' ('' JOVIAL Reverse Polish Notation Calculators''), an open-source HP-16C simulator, forked from ''WRPN'' 6.0.2 in Java, but with all of the text set to be rendered from vector fonts (instead of the

bitmap font A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor. A computer font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for print ...

used in ''WRPN''), and licensed it under the free

Apache License The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software ...

. During the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

Foote fully rewrote ''JRPN'' code in Flutter and licensed it under

GPLv3 The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. ''JRPN'' is available now in two variants, 15C and 16C (simulating

HP-15C The HP-15C is a high-end scientific programmable calculator of Hewlett-Packard's Voyager series produced between 1982 and 1989. The "C" in the name refers to the continuous memory, such that the calculator retains it's state when switched off. ...

and HP-16C accordingly), for Android, Linux, Mac OS, Windows and as a

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

. Also there is another RPN calculator of the same name, developed by William Giel as freeware proprietary software. It has been last released in 1999.

Gallery

File:Wrpn screenshot.gif, WRPN, bitmap fonts UI File:Jrpn legacy screenshot.png, JRPN (Legacy), vector fonts UI

References

External links